Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/75

Rh into the harness of Aristotle, and taking the bit of Fabricius between his teeth; and then, either assuming the ideas of the former as premises, or those of the latter as topics of discussion or dissent, he labours on endeavouring to find Nature in harmony with the Stagyrite, or at variance with the professor of Padua—for, in spite of many expressions of respect and deference for his old master, Harvey evidently delights to find Fabricius in the wrong. Finally, so possessed is he by scholastic ideas, that he winds up some of his opinions upon animal reproduction by presenting them in the shape of logical syllogisms.

The age of Harvey, then, was not competent to produce a work on generation,—it was still an impossible undertaking. Yet has Harvey written a remarkable book; one that teems with interesting observation, and that presents the author to us in the character of the elegant writer, the scholar, and the poet as well as the discoverer—if, indeed, poet and discoverer, though variously applied, be not identical terms. Besides the points already referred to, as immediately connected with his subject, we here find Harvey anticipating modern surgery, by applying a ligature to the main artery of a tumour which he wished to extirpate, and so making its subsequent removal much more easy. Here, too, we find him, a century and a half before his contemporaries, in the most rapidly progressive period in the history of human knowledge, throwing out the first hint of the true use of the lungs. Hitherto the lungs had been regarded as surrounding the heart for the purpose of ventilating the blood and tempering or moderating its heat, the heart being viewed as the focus or hearth of the innate heat; and Harvey himself generally uses language in harmony with these ideas; but in one instance, the lightning of genius giving him a glimpse of the truth, he says, "Air is given neither for the cooling nor the nutrition of animals ***